


Loss Ficlet: Alexa

by missclairebelle



Series: Loss (In Chronological Order) [33]
Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alexa - Freeform, F/M, automating life and smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-23 05:42:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18147848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: Jamie brings home a new toy. Claire teases him.  Frivolity ensues.





	Loss Ficlet: Alexa

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HoldHerTightAndSayHerName](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HoldHerTightAndSayHerName/gifts).



> This lives in the timeline between Jamie and Claire moving in and their first Christmas. <3

##  **Loss Ficlet  
** **Alexa  
****December 2016**

“A  _smart home_ ,” Jamie repeated, as though the phrase would somehow garner a meaning ( _any meaning whatsoever_ ) if repeated in a slower, profoundly condescending tone.   **  
**

From my vantage point on the couch, I drew my blanket closer to my chest and rolled to my side.  He had walked in the door ten minutes earlier, woken me from my late afternoon nap, and announced, with no small amount of male chest-puffing pride, that “ _Alexa’s joinin’ our family, Sassenach_.”  Now, he was threading the power cord to his new devicethrough the back of our entertainment system and warring with a tangle of other cords.

Recalling the high level of interest he had feigned quite convincingly just a week earlier at one of my work dinners ( _a function attended by lots of doctors “droning on uselessly” and offering only “small food and snooty wine”_ ), I decided to return the favor of manufacturing interest.  

“Is it a speaker?”

“Aye, but it’s no’ just a speaker. It can  _automate_  things.”

The word  _‘skeptical’_  did not even begin to cover my reaction, so I attempted to tamp down the tartness in my tone as I echoed, “ _Things_.”

“ _C’mon, Claire_.”

He was exasperated with me, and it made my stomach clench with the impulse to tease him, to raise his hackles, to see how he would ( _hopefully_ ) take it out on me later.  

“Explain it to me. What  _things_  can it automate?”

He made a petulant little huffing sound, gave me a quick look ( _probably for assurance that I wasn’t taking the piss_ ), and turned back to his task. He had already explained ( _ad nauseum_ ) that he was part of the team putting together an advertising campaign for a new technology.  Technology that promised to automate various household functions.  ( _Whatever that meant_.)  Now said devices were in our flat for him to “ _get a feel on them, ye ken?_ ” And I had less than no idea what  _any of it_  meant.  But he had been so earnest holding the box up in front of my half-awake face that I decided not to shift my slumber from living room to bedroom. Instead, I was endeavouring to stay awake for a demonstration.  (‘ _This better be good,’ the sleepy Sunday side of my subconscious quibbled._ )

“Tell me,” I said again, this time a little more awake.

“Och, weel.  Lights.  The security system.”

“Will it feed the dog when it’s bitter cold?”  Even though his back was to me, I could divine his facial expression.  His eyes undoubtedly rolled, smooth as pistons.  His upper lip likely quivered in a war waged on the blade’s edge of a smirk and smile. I continued, unable to resist teasing him a little.  “Will it melt the ice from my windscreen wipers?  Boil the kettle for me when I wake up?  Relocate your smelly socks to the hamper?”

After a moment, he relented, offering, “I can probably rig up something for the kettle. Would that please ye, ye difficult woman?”

He shot a glance and a good-natured smirk at me over his shoulder, and I couldn’t help smiling back.  I’m sure he didn’t miss the measure of sarcasm in my voice when I said, “ _Groundbreaking_.”

“I’ll go buy ye a wee outlet timer, and we can put one of these in our bedroom. Then ye can set it to boil before yer feet even hit the floor.”

I pulled myself up to a half-sitting position and watched him with a small amount of interest as I reached for the box.  “Are you sure that you want one of these in our  _bedroom_?”

“There’s no’ a  _camera_  in it, Claire.”  He paused for a moment, tossing another glance over his shoulder with a look that conveyed purely filthy intention.  “Do ye  _want_  a camera in the bedroom?”

“Jamie–” I started warily, only to be cut off by his earnestness.

“Because… I have a passcode on my phone, and there are some awfully long nights on business trips.”

Groaning, I sat up. My feet disturbed the slumbering form of the dog we were petsitting as I blindly set about scrabbling my feet across the chilly floorboards for my slippers.  The traitorous beast immediately ambled over to Jamie, and proceeded to look at me with the sappiest set of eyes that I had ever seen.  

The moment over, Jamie looked down at the dog and hummed a quiet, apologetic noise.  “ _Say ye’re sorry_  to the lad.”

“Who?” I asked, a bit incredulously. 

Jamie tutted.  Not finding my slippers, I sighed and resigned myself to cold toes, my eyebrows making their way north to my hairline. “Do you mean  _you_  or to the  _dog_?”

Looking back at me, he returned the entertainment system to its position against the wall.  “To both of us.”

“ _Oh._ Well.  I’m  _sorry_ ,” I chuckled, starting a losing battle with my hair.  

“Leave it.”  

“What?”

“Your  _hair_ , Sassenach.”  His voice had darkened.  

Dropping my hands to my lap, I gave him a lopsided smile.  “Why?”

“Because ye look sexy when ye’re a wee bit messy.”

“Just what every girl wants to hear… that they’re  _messy_.”

Ignoring me, he rose to his feet and smoothed out his sweatpants.  “Alexa, dim the lights to fifty percent.”

I jumped a little as the lights responded. Only mildly conciliatory, I commented, “That’s…  _impressive_.”

“Alexa, raise the temperature one degree.”

The heat snapped on with a gentle blowing that lifted the curtain over the vent.  At that point, I’m sure that my expression shifted from merely confused to mildly distressed.  “Why the temperature?”

“Because I intend to get ye naked–”

“– _Jamie–_ ” ( _a groan separated into two syllables_ )

“–and dinna want ye whining about how ye’ve gone all goose pimply–”

“– _whining_ …gee, thanks–” ( _the hairs on the backs of my hands going electric_ )

“–unless they’re ones I give to ye, of course.”

Snorting back a laugh at that, I primly crossed my legs and gave him my most withering look.  “I’m a  _lady_ , my lad.”

“ _Sure_  ye are.”  

The sparkle in his eye spoke of an intention that he’d had on repeat since our first gasp and I hoped that he would have until our last moments together ( _hopefully uncountable years and years down the road_ ). He closed the space between us in two broad steps.  

“Alexa, play ‘At Last’ by Etta James.”

I took his outstretched hand. The device confirmed his request as I allowed him to tug me onto my feet.  Face to face, I couldn’t help but to laugh at him.  “I’m surprised it can recognize your accent.”

“I’ll set aside my faux outrage if ye dance wi’ me, ye snot.”  The first tones of the song swelled from the newly-installed gadget and I rolled my eyes, allowing him to pull me close to his chest.  His grip was in equal measure firm and gentle.  Tucking my head under his chin, I let him lead an almost stand-still sway to the first pull of violin.  

We had rarely danced together, but something about it felt perfect there with the mysterious, chesty voice of Etta James made us into dancers.  ( _A long, moaning declaration of “at last” was joined by his hand on my waist, spurring our hips into a slow, pendulum arc._ )

My barefoot pressed down into the bony arch of his barefoot.

I whispered “ _sorry_ ” ( _my love has come along_ ), his whispered “ _shhh_ ” was no more than a warming breath along my scalp.  

The expanse of his chest rumbled just enough to let me know that he was singing along ( _my lonely days are over_ ).  I couldn’t hear a single word from his lips.  I let the silent words seep into me through the tenderness in his fingertips ( _life is like a song_ ).  His hand skimmed up my waist, practiced and at home there ( _oh yeah_ ).  

Far into his chest cavity, well below the place where my cheek rested, his heart throbbed and plopped as its close-open-push-close-open-push rhythm went on and on ( _my heart was wrapped up in clover_ ). The universe of him ( _his very existence_ ), was stowed in his ribcage beneath my lips ( _the night that I looked at you_ ).

His voice lifted, more conversational than singing along.  ( _In time with Etta, Jamie said: “I found a dream that I could speak to.”_ )  I blinked, somehow stunned even after all of our months together that he could surprise me – the depth with which he spoke the words, the fact that he knew the words at all.  

And then again, his lips moved and my eyes blurred with something ( _not tears, well maybe tears_ ).

( _An insistence older than the core of the earth or the carbon making up our bodies: “A dream that I can call my own.”_ )

Etta crooned about a thrill to press her cheek to, a thrill she had never known.  

And as the faceless man in the song  _smiled, he smiled oh_ ,it was the casting of a songstress’ spell. The smile bade the denizens of the lyrics to exist through the decades ( _in Heaven_ ).

Jamie licked his lips before he kissed me me.

Slow at first.  

A brush of his mouth. A sweep of tongue. One hand cupping my face and one holding me tight against him.

The song faded away into another.

_A Sunday Kind of Love._

It was an irony not lost on me with his Sunday whisky-flavored lips and the knotting in my belly as his fingers wove into my tangled curls.

( _Etta became my emblem, wanting to discover a certain kind of lover, scheming and dreaming, to show her the way. Oh Christ, my fingers were fighting with the tie on his sweatpants._ )

My belly turned itself in fits just as his fingers wound deeper into the hair at the nape of my neck.

 _Monday.  Tuesday.  Wednesday.  A Thursday.  Friday.  Or Saturday.  Oh, nothing but a Sunday afternoon_.

“Kiss me harder,” I managed to mumble as he pulled back for a breath. No.  Maybe not a breath. Maybe he wanted a look at me ( _just maybe_ ). I was pleading, kerosene in my skin ( _my fingers agents seeking a match to light, yearning for the conflagration_ ). “Like you mean it.”

Lips glossed with the imprint of my mouth, Jamie quirked an eyebrow before obliging with an insistent, solid pressure over my mouth. My fingers were born of desperation, working harder ( _senselessly, uselessly_ ) at the triple knot acting as a vice, securing his sweatpants low on his hips.

A century of teasing and he broke away from me, his hands going to steady my own hips. The smirk dawned a triumphant return on his kiss-swollen mouth.  ( _Cocky.  Knowing.  And sexy as hell.  The match to light, the spark to ignite my veins._ )  He had a tone to match the smirk when he remarked, “Two songs’s all it takes for ye, then?  To get hot?”

“Don’t  _gloat_ , you rude bastard,” I muttered, no small amount of frustration blooming in me at the sweatpants that had taken on a stubbornness not akin to their owner. Giving up, I unzipped my sweatshirt and started to peel it from my shoulders in an effort to dispatch it to the floor.  

“No.”  I furrowed my brows and his hand carefully situated the fabric over each breast.

“Leave it on.”

Swallowing hard, I nodded, looking down at the dusky hint of my left nipple, hard and pressing the fabric up from my body.

“No brassiere, Dr. Beauchamp?” he inquired, drawing his t-shirt over his head in a fluid defrocking that made my mind fog. ( _Oh God, I loved him and I would kill him for his cocksure attitude one of these days._ )“I thought ye maintained that ye were a  _lady_?”

“ _Your_  lady,” I countered, hopping from foot to foot until my yoga pants were pooled in an ampersand on the area rug.  “And that seems  _sexy_  to you?  Commenting quite clinically on my lack of bra?  Covering my breasts up? What about  _complimenting_  them?”

His thumb ran a circuit around his lips.  “Ye ken yer breasts are great, Claire, but yer arse is my favorite.”

“Alexa, play ‘ _At Last_ ’ on repeat,” I mumbled as he drew my body ( _a helpless ragdoll_ )to him again.  Alexa chattered her disembodied computerized consent to play the song on repeat, and the familiar tune started again.

Jamie’s smiling mouth resumed its torturously slow pace.  He kissed me until I felt damned.  

I called to mind  _Gone with the Wind_.He kissed me like he was Rhett and I was Scarlett.  

( _The words of it returned to me.  The film I’d seen a thousand times, even as a rather unromantic child.  No one had ever kissed me like Jamie. Those men who knew nothing of women, knew nothing of me. They didn’t exist. Jamie made me feel somewhat faint, drawing my last conscious breath, my last conscious.  He let it mingle with what was left of his own breath.  A gasp, a handful of flesh – breast, hip, buttock, the scruff of my neck.  An eraser swiping across a blackboard, smearing memories of any other lover, leaving the space clean for him and him alone.  He surrounded me, made me bloom, forced into my lips the brand of a kiss I would wear always._ )  

Lowering ourselves onto the couch, he raised his head out of the kiss.  The taste of his mouth and the feeling of his lips were seared there.  Indelibly.  Perfectly.  Throbbing, aching, begging for another collision.  

“I might need a bit of help from ye,  _sorcha_.”

Breathless, I nodded and slipped my hand into the band of his sweatpants.  The warmth there was familiar.  I had memorized the shape of the wiry strip of hair below his navel, but my fingers ached for the reacquaintance. I could feel the shadow of his cock warm and ready, an apparition throbbing just below my palm. “Help?” I asked, though it was apparent he had no need at all of my help.  I gave him a look, the trajectory of my mouth promising the coyest use of my freshly-branded lips possible. “That can be arranged.”

He shifted, flexed, and grasped my wrist through the fabric.  

“I thought you wanted help,” I said.  He wrestled my fingers free of his pants and carefully maneuvered my hand to rest on the ditch of skin between the gaping sides of my sweatshirt.

“Aye, I do.  Touch  _yourself_ ,  _a nighean_ ,” he said softly.

Breath caught somewhere in the vicinity of my throat as I evaluated his request.  Though we were hardly strangers to touching ourselves in one another’s presence, the request had never been made so  _directly_.  Moving to the side, I leaned on the couch’s armrest and put a foot firmly on his hip.  

“Ye’re an obliging lass,” he commented before capturing his lower lip between his teeth, eyes weighted down.  Etta continued her song in the background ( _at last, at last, at last, again, again, again at last_ )as I carefully cupped one breast through my sweatshirt.  Though  _nothing_ about my physical relationship with him  _embarrassed me_ , there was something forbidden in this.  The openness of his request, the way the lines of his abdomen straightened and pulled tight as he inhaled carefully, watched me become bold.

“Ever hear the one about sauce for the gander?” I asked, thoughtfully playing with the zip of my sweatshirt before letting the fabric fall open.

It brought him out of the haze, his eyes wide and starkly awake, though he slurred, “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Ye want me to…to––”

“I do.”

“In front of you?”

Stifling a laugh, I tilted my head to the side.  “If I can do it in front of  _you_ , you can certainly return the favor.”  I let my legs fall open, one hand going to the waistband of my knickers. I hummed a little at the first touch. “Unless, of course, you’d rather that I stopped…”  Over the peak of one breast, I lightly ticked my thumb to and fro, to and fro, over and over ( _at last, my love; heaven, a heart in clover, at last, oh_ ).  My thumb worked a steady count of a metronome, working half-time to my pulse as my heart threatened to unseat my composure.  

Jamie swallowed audibly, the line of his throat bobbing.  As though hypnotized, he reached down and shifted the elastic of his sweatpants until he sprang free.  My nipple ached, puckered tight at the nearness of him, the careful way his hand wrapped into a fist and the practiced ease of his twist, the slight tug.  

“That’s a good lad,” I murmured, leaning back as I carefully undertook the act of pleasuring myself in the line of sight of the man I loved. The man who asked to see something so intimate that it almost felt like he had made a home in the very marrow of my bones.

Gaelic flowed from him then ( _curses or a commendation of his soul to God_ ).

I shifted the scrap of fabric between my legs to the side, indulging the anguish that was sparking light in his irises.

He made a small, urgent noise in the depths of his throat as my ring and middle fingers carefully disappeared from sight. Seeing him like this ( _cloudy and readily thrown off of the slight dominant streak that dwelled deep in his belly_ ), I was curious. Unable to help my fascination, I asked, “What are you thinking?”

“I’m  _not_ ,” he mumbled insistently.

“Yes you are.  I can see it on your face.”  He wet his palm with a swipe of his tongue, returning to his job as I made small lazy circles with my thumb.  Through the combination of things happening ( _my touch, seeing his undoing_ ), my breath broke into quiet, half gasps.

Eyes gone to slits, he muttered, “Ye don’t want to know what I’m thinkin’, Claire.”

“Oh, yes, I do–oh, wait.”  I narrowed my eyes, stilling my ministrations. “If you’re thinking about someone other than me, I  _don’t_  want to know.”

At that, he fixed me with a wide-eyed stare. Something coursed through me at that look – rolling in my belly, making my limbs tremble.  It was such a naked adoration that I could not even find it within myself to continue ribbing him about what was running through his mind.  

( _Me.  Only me.  Nothing and no one else.  Ever.  Forever perhaps._ )  

The shift was subtle, but his desperation morphed.  He was a wolf eyeing a fat sheep.  His hand fell away from his cock, and he made short work of shucking his sweatpants and moving to loom over me.  

“Knickers off.”  He buried his face in my hair, the tip of his nose traveling along the curve of my nose before a warm breath billowed over my ear. ( _Humid.  Demanding.  Purposeful._ )My hips rose and he grabbed for me.“Now, Sassenach.”  

Mesmerized, I offered only the mildest cooperation as he stripped me bare. He was steady, his body still over mine as he kissed me.  With a whimper, I realized as he buried himself solidly inside me that he was transferring that need to me.  He was pushing it out of each of his pores so I could feel every aching tendril of his desperation.  The soft stretch of it, the familiarity of his shape, the pressure of his hips against me, the slick smear of his sweaty palm on my lower belly.

He hitched one of my legs up to rest at his waist. The long-muscled stretch opened my hips, allowing him to sink only minutely nearer, but changing the sensation almost entirely.  The closeness of him made me groan; the fullness ( _everywhere_ ) urged me to beg.

Unable to situate letters in a meaningful string, I released a series of senseless consonants.  

He laughed low in his throat.  “Play wi’ fire and ye may get singed, Sassenach,” he whispered, catching each of my wrists.  I was pinned like a butterfly against the couch, useless but for a jerky, writhing manifestation of need for him.  “Ye want to know what I was thinking?”

His tongue traveled the shell of my ear.  Lobe.  Cartilage.  His lips found my hairline just briefly before he raked his teeth back down an already charted path.  He didn’t move.  

“Where were we? Oh, aye–ye wanted to hear what I was thinking.”

“Huh-uh,” I protested weakly, panting and weighted down. “No.”

“You started it,” he commented lowly as his fingers tightened just a little.  “I’ll finish it.”

Over my ear, he whispered  _precisely_  what he was thinking.  Just minutes earlier, I had been convinced that he had branded my mouth with his own.  His words, though, were the real brand.  They signed his name on the soles of my feet, the palms of my hands, the roof of my mouth.  

_He was mine.  He wanted me to know it._

He slackened his grip, bringing my hands to his mouth.  He kissed a collection of my fingertips at random and then placed my hands on him just above where we were joined.  Suddenly, he rose.  Just as suddenly, he slipped free and then drove back into me.  The sound that came from my chest and throat and belly bounded off the walls. It learned the shape of our living room and filled the space to the exposed rafters before dissolving to memory.  

And then he did it again.  

And when the sound threatened to rip free again, his hand clapped over my mouth with a low, chuckled grunt of, “ _Christ, Sassenach. We have neighbors._ ”

Over my muffled groans, he kept the slow, decisive pace.

The quiet, wet sound of our flesh joining and separating, seeking and receiving drowned out Etta and any conscious thought.  

When he stopped, I sank my teeth into the soft heel of his hand.  He hissed, and freed my mouth.  “ _Ifrinn, Claire_.”

Reaching between us, his thumb covered me as he started to move again. Sensation ceased to exist in its entirety and I was quick to shatter.  I heard some pieces of the whole formerly known as Claire mumble the word “ _baby_ ,” but not even have the good sense to cringe. Chuckling, he lost rhythm at the utterance though his hips continued to crush into mine.

_More.  More.  Never enough._

As the slick tumult in my belly faded, I anchored my hand to his cheek, blinking hard and trying to focus on him.  His narrowed eyes, his blown pupils, his sweat-slicked upper lip.  His pink cheeks, his solid fingers cupping my hips.  His unruly mop of curls ( _the ones he needs to have trimmed_ ) flopping hazardously across his forehead as he moved.

I was back down to earth by the time he came, deflating and shaking and pronouncing benedictions into my throat.

After a time he lifted of me, shifting and molding our fronts together.  After a time, his hand embarked on a lazy pattern making along my flank.  Blandly, no longer breathless but growing sleepy, I whispered, “We made a mess of the couch.”

“Alexa,” he began, voice low, “clean up the couch.”

Alexa apologized for not understanding and asked him to repeat.

Hitching my leg back over his hip, he closed his eyes.

In my poshest accent, I said, “Alexa, clean up the couch.”  The contraption again offered a canned, mechanical apology, and I sighed.  “Your toy is a bit useless, my lad.”

“It’s yer anniversary present, ye ken.”

“Anniversary?” I asked, feeling a little stupefied.  “April? You took me home in  _April_.”

Snorting, he shook his head.  “December is when ye stole that drink from me in the pub.”

Dumbfounded, I scraped my nails across the plane of his stomach.  “How do you remember this stuff?”

The shrug was barely noticeable as he gathered me closer to his chest.  “I guess I just love ye.”  


End file.
